Harlem Sunset
by rednightmare
Summary: Once he had a real name. A story of the city, bad magic, and Baron Angeltown before he was Nines. (Nines Rodriguez character backstory. Historical fiction. Highly speculative and completely overhauled.)
1. Prologue: There is a Phrase

_**Mission Statement: **_**I have three weaknesses: historical fiction, big cities, and character backstory. Smash them together, throw **_**Bloodlines**_** into the mix, and you have this: a piece fleshing-out Nines Rodriguez's background. Not everything will be canon, but this is all just speculation, anyway.**

_**Series Guide**_**: You needn't have read any of my other VTMB works to start this free-standing piece. **_**Harlem**_** is highly compatible and interactive with **_**Byzantine Black**_**, but they are not co-dependent.**

_**Formalities**_**: Rating will be flagged 'M' at the first appropriate chapter. This rating is due to offensive language, violent crime, sexuality, setting racism/sexism/classism, drug use and general bad intentions. The opinions within are in no way synonymous with my own. Also please note that I don't own any characters or lore you recognize from **_**Masquerade**_**.**

**With that said, my sincere thanks for reading, and I hope you find some enjoyment in this little side-story!**

_**REIMAGINING**_**: **_**Harlem**_** is being strategically reorganized for better flow and a greater variety of content. The new format will switch actively and non-sequentially between the title character's post-Embrace, pre-Embrace and childhood, but should be easy to follow. (I expect to eventually include some pieces dated just before LaCroix's arrival in LA, and so include recognizable favorites, too: Skelter, Damsel, etc.) Old chapters will be re-uploaded as the process catches up. Thanks for your patience.**

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**Prologue: There is a Phrase**

It's what they call it when somebody sticks in a knife, and you die.

He's never been to Harlem. He's only been to New York twice, never on tour, and he's sure as hell never seen a sunset there. The reasons for this are more than what might be obvious. Men like him have graver business than visitation or good living; men like him have tough prerogatives and a fast gun; men like him are metal polish, baby-blues, hateful flesh-and-blood. Monsters do not count their coup in coins or the pretty kind of cities. He does not begin until the daylight is already done.

It's what they say when your jig's up, your run's through, and who the fuck has ever cared about the little games you play?

That's what these two fast-tracks seem to be, anyway – vice trade and what those like him call Jyhad – so apparently most everyone recognizes them for what they are. Organized crime, gunsmoke politics, blood-games. They are the standard rules of any night: from Oklahoma to Saint Louis, the jungle that made him; from the circuit he mans in Chicago to his Sire's shiny-fresh New York enterprise; from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the freest States there are.

Bright as the lights get in these places, he thinks it's always too dark. There are rats the size of lapdogs in the Midwest – some rats wearing bowties, caps and leers – who need that darkness to grow. The Great Lakes are full of dead fish and cholera that churn it black. The slaughterhouses and steel mills pour smoke from their chimneys that blacken brown brick. His Ma gave birth to him one night in a labor tent beneath an orchard full of peaches, honey bees and other women; even then, one step past the tarp, there is a heaviness, a devil waiting, a hollow black weight. It soaked into his hair and the beard on his lip, his chin. It's in the tint of his blood and the back of his throat. That empty nothing-color is the print of the games, and that's what's going to sink your last sun – Chitown , wheat field, or a honeymoon suite in Harlem, August of 1956.

_August 3__rd_, says the calendar Vin's got tacked on the yellow paper over his crumbly office wall. A Thursday. Breezy, scatter-clouds, Windy City, maybe 80-something degrees.

It's beautiful weather – beautiful night – but if anybody resented moving upstate, it'd been Vin. Boxes and cartons and ledgers stacked high; it'd been five years now since Chelle sent the lot of them north, but Cappo never quite unpacked. _"City stinks like a fucking meat locker," _he'd choke, sleeve over his moustache, windows all shut. Black vapor rose from the stockyard way; dark river ran full of liquid animal and sawed men. All this time, and those boxes were still right where he'd dropped them when they'd started hauling shit in. You couldn't see that potbelly vest, those unbuttoned cuffs or that peppercorn comb-over behind the crates piled up on his desk. Kind of funny and annoying as fuck to do business with. Vin was a racist asshole, always used to give him shit; but with sharper canines in his jaw and Rochelle's blood in them both, they'd come a long way from thin looks and slurs.

Was about to find out how far – because something turned up after sundown way out in Harlem that night. And because she owned them both, and she'd wanted them here.

He runs in the door of Vincent Cappo's place that evening with a telephone ring in his head, an old frog in his throat, and a look like something between destiny and fear. He stands there under the office suite arch for a moment in all the loose papers and beneath the swing of that dangerous ceiling fan. There is a gap beneath his sternum, inside his lungs, down the space of his pipes. He can't make the words.

_Speak up, sugar; tell me the story; sing me a song. _

It's what they say when your hourglass breaks, when the grains all sift bottom, and your time's dwindled out.

He's been doing what he does – this twice-game, these rotten deals – for a pretty long while now. Fourteen years dead – shorter than many, but still longer than some. Twenty-one men put under his command in downtown Chicago; three vampires; seven ghouls. He has seen a lot more than that not-make-it. He has seen an end-of-life truth cash out in bad booze, nail bombs, intestines on tarmac and cars blown to black tin. He has especially seen it beneath that machete been chopped in his clavicle, now just about twelve years ago; watched it run, horrorstruck, down his stomach and chest; wet his large, rough hands. Violence – a necessity, an emotion, a means, sometimes a right. It is how Brujah communicate with the world. His breed was made of the hitters, the walking-the-walkers, the fire-starters. He's set plenty of fires – burnt down old wood in old houses full of old, rotten money – and he's killed a mighty number of other monsters, other men. They all die the same at the opposite end of his pistol. _Bang, click, bang_. It is a rote kind of violence. All their eyes get wide, wild and glossy, a second of ghost before the round slides home.

Graver business. Ironic word choice, and even more ironic that this life, and this way of living, always boils down to people at its root. He is not a person anymore. Not a real one. But he kills people, and he supervises people, and he profits off people, and he inspires people to love.

It's what his predecessor said when there was a kid to be killed and a buck to be made off somebody's chopped-off head.

There was never a detailed lecture or tutorial on how to do this job. People intuition was born-in, and people skills learned quick; if you had neither, you'd better pick up a bat, or find a different occupation than this one. He had started off smaller potatoes than the sunny-day ghouls and side-talking humans around him. Bully-work, chopper squads, machinegun fire: slaughter, rinse, repeat. He shot and threatened and smashed and stabbed his way through youth. Then came the captainhood: direct, organize, call good calls. Smile at kids and make them want to give you your way. Finally – when she trusted him as much as any woman like that could with the color she drank and the evil she knew – Rochelle's curse was hers to trickle down.

You don't ask, he's learned. You tell. When you're the sort of beast they are – when you've got an honest face, a dark shade of hair, a clear stare and pretty teeth in your mouth – they come to you for purpose. You give it to them. You control, you talk, and you rise up on the armies that build.

Win-you-over, smile you dumb, rile you up, beat you down. That was what a good leader and a grown Brujah does.

It's what they tell you when you're taking hot gambles, because you're cocky little bastard, one who's going to be careful or get himself killed.

Strange to hear that warning all the time from a woman with pearls on her neck and bullets in her pocket, who'd dressed you to murder, who'd already killed you before. But Rochelle kept repeating it. The phrase could be a threat as easy as it was an appeal to watch-out, to be wise, to remember what the world around you was. It would shed no tears for you, kid; squash you just like a bug. It'd skin you naked and crunch up your bones and swallow you down. She told him frequently, maybe every day.

_Careful, kiddo – careful, careful, careful. _

He'd been careful, but not where it counted, and not fiercely enough.

David Bravo Rodriguez died in the summer of 1942. It was early July on the floor of a shitty beachwood apartment somewhere south of East Saint Louis. It was a hot, humid night. He woke up to the hum of junebug wings and the _plink_ of spilled draft rolling off his table, bittersweet sugar, dipping into the thick red liquor all over the ground. Something awful in his body and something crushing on his ribs. There was no stitch and no bandage where the tip of that blade had sliced his chin. She'd since pulled the rest of it out of him and tossed it aside. Cheap beer and smeared blood – there was broken glass and droplets in the back of his hand.

Bad magic; blacker nights.

It's what Rochelle keeps telling him, anyway. It's a storybook way to die; it is not a family of love.

He didn't know why she picked him. Just had. He'd tried asking once but Chelle brushed it off like the hindsight offended. Whether she'd had this in mind since they met or it was a whim, made up on the way, he didn't bother guessing. Just something that happened and just someone who happened to him.

"_Cry me a river, turtle dove,"_ she'd laugh at the _why-me_ accusations, sitting sideways across an ugly chair, toes of her shoes tapping lazily midair. Nicotine wafted between _Russian Red_ and a tiny nose. Fingers would twist gold hair and gold chain in the curls of her fist, the leather of a glove. It was the first time he could remember wanting to hurt her. His knuckles burned and his molars bit and there was a thrumming in the quiet of his head.

Julie London sings loud in Vin's office that beautiful night in 1956.

He wondered where she picked up the stupid expression, anyway. Most of their boys were Midwest-born and cornfield-raised, talking bull or not talking at all, but he'd never heard anybody else throw it around like a mafia joke. Chester in particular – poor Chester – had scoffed the idiom down; Rochelle was from New Orleans, not New York, and her lilyleaf ass sure as shit wasn't cut out of Harlem. His Sire had that knee-jerk, toughboy air of entitlement. Might've been insulting to some, the way she'd wind around and pull at her ear, lipstick on her teeth and cobblestone speech that kind of slapped. But heaven help the goon stupid enough to say anything. He said very little when they started out, and still not much to her, but she dealt him exactly the slow-burn death they'd snickered at.

There was nothing poetic about it, but the real men (not the writers) don't say this phrase like a poet – not with a knife in your collar, or the hilt in your hand.

"The fuck do you want, bambino?" Vin greeted the Childe of his Domitor this way every single goddamn day. It was a mockery – had begun as resentment, a jab at the bad lie Chelle told him some ancient-history ago – but became something like a ceasefire between them. Unspoken familiarity, bond of disrespect. He didn't dig back with _greaseball_ or _Capo-Capi_ or anything else. Rattled the ghoul's cage better just to lean your palm heel on his desk and grin and whistle _How's business, Vinny? _

Not tonight.

Tonight Vincent is smacking something out on a typewriter, nimble fingers, fat hands. Tonight he pushes the cardboard cartons aside and scowls at Rodriguez like to kick him, like to tell him to screw off, get out of his hair. He didn't do either. The look on the vampire's face, squealed to a halt there half inside his doorframe, is ashen with what it needs to say. There is a slackness and a calculating dismay to him, a wide-eyed bleach. He's trying to work something out. The brim of his hat, the pale gray of that fedora felt, make the silver beneath it into a fog-weather alloy. They both freeze up, go stiff. Fright on a Brujah's face is one of the worst signs. His collar's mussed up into the slick pitch of his hair but there aren't any bloodstains on that summer coat.

"They know," he blurts, gets it out, a clip of air that scorches all the way through.

It wasn't a code word and it wasn't a rule, but it was something that scared those who stood to be stabbed.

When he was still a real kid – he'd never made it to a real man – there'd been a lot of wandering, a lot of anger, a lot of eating and wearing things that weren't his to eat or wear. He'd been cold in a weird, skin-deep way all the time. It was a chill from the stormwind and the way America worked in that day: skinny kids, fat cats, a couple deadly women in between. He'd been enforcing outside speakeasies and warehouses before crossing Rochelle's crew. Mississippi harbor on a blustery day in 1924_._ That Argentine Molina had been the best possession he legally owned; he'd lived off nine-millimeter, practiced imaginary shots at horseflies and birds at the docksides he worked at; he'd shot a few people. But Rodriguez didn't appreciate what killing was until he started rumrunning for her, and running down the people she'd hate.

Then came a time where he was half-man: copper in his mouth, in his workings, buzzing sharp and brutal down the big arteries to his hands. He threw up twice that second time, dry-heaved the blood out of his belly, got queasy when she took that penknife to her elbow. Every dose of it made his insides wrench, tangle. He'd grab his ribs and try not to upchuck on the ratty corduroy couch in her den. Felt like he couldn't keep it down. Felt like that kid's body didn't want to become the monster ahead – like it knew, when he didn't, there was a price to being a demon's pet.

She had a handful of his shirt and a bottle of beer to the sweat on his face. _"Hurting you, macky?"_

He had a clammy headache and a red bottom lip and a grown-man's mind stuck behind a young-man face. _"Somethin awful,"_ he'd say – it was a simplicity, a sting.

Came a time where he didn't want the horror of it anymore – the bluntness of his teeth, the bad-magic taste of her blood – but being a ghoul is like homeopathy, a venom-cure. He'd get sick when she fed him, and sicker when she stopped.

"_What you wanted, ain't it? Quit bellyaching and quit begging me. Turns out, I decided it _was_ past time you got growing up,"_ Chelle teased – like he'd done something stupid by asking to quit; like there was no malice in how she'd shrugged _sure, baby, whatever you want_; like a creature who had something planned. November of 1941. He was going to retire, he said. She said _"Good fucking luck."_

He thought it would take decades – but once the sickness faded, he was twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five in the space of two shaking hands and a few months.

Didn't turn out like he'd hoped it would. You can't ever turn back to human, it seems, because now he is a Brujah with a smile soldered on his face and weapons soldiered in his hands. He's got one of those voices. He's got a cut on his chin and a freckle on his cheek and a somethin-awful in the gunmetal blue.

It's an intimidation tactic when there's a thirty-eight in your hand or when there could be, maybe, a blade in the breast of your nice coat.

Inside that office, behind the frosted green-glass and buttoned windows, is a minute of nothing while both of them recalibrate the information. The ghoul asks what he didn't need to: "Who knows what?"

"Sabbat. They got one of mine in Brooklyn and beat it out of him. Don."

"Don. Don, Don, Don. Don bit it?" Vin demands, voice tight, tidy clothing ruined by the ink spills on that fine mauve vest. Stress made him into a yapping dog. He launches up. There's a draft coming in beneath the open door that smells like rain; Rodriguez lunges into the room and shuts it behind him. He does not elaborate right away. He does not sit down.

"Don rang; I don't know. Somebody squealed on him – said somebody did. Sabbat crashed the depot, Apached it. Total loss. Took two in the gut," the Brujah puffs, licking his lips, out of breath without needing it. He looks like he sprinted straight up from Trumbull. Vin is quick in scuttling up from his writing desk, around the unused counter and into that undecorated front lobby. "They shot him. They know."

"The fuck they do. They don't know. They don't know shit," the Cap spits, because they couldn't, because They hated Them, because there is nothing to do from here but panic and cuss and try to punch faster than everybody else.

"Got their claws into Don?" Don Ernest, a trooper who was loyal to his recruiter and his boss, who knew the score, who didn't have the gumption or the devious streak to cook stories up. Honesty was a part of his name. He'd hung up before you could make heads-or-tails of if the ghoul was going to die. "They do. Her deal with Baker is tonight and it's no coincidence. Sabbat know. Know what this is to them, anyway. They got to."

Rochelle belongs to the Anarch Party only in name, a fringe supporter, whose century-long drug enterprise aligns more closely with Ventrue pocketbooks than freedom fighting. She resents being told what to do. But she does not flinch, liberty cries and grassroots power, at doing business with the enemy – in narcotics or protection bids. Neither does she expect more from those Camarilla suits inclined to bargain across the border. His Sire may not like bureaucrats regulating their world, but it is regulation itself that makes people like her, the rule-breakers, rich. Without the black tie people who say _no_, she would have no occupation and no money at all.

So she does not balk when one of those black ties mails her for a meeting, to parlay in a Sheriff's home in Harlem. With all her militias, grenades and firepower parked just outside New York City, Rochelle has little to fear from these number-crunchers, she says, and they have an interest in being nice neighbors. They have an interest in not provoking her, in not pissing her off too much. She can be a big annoyance, Miss Adrieux's told them – a great big semi-fucking-automatic annoyance – or, in some bipartisan worries, she can be an excellent fair-weather friend.

Nobody wants Black Hand footholds resprouting in New York, nobody likes seeing Sabbat bankrolls, and nobody – not the least of those bodies hers – is going to stand for it when convenient truces can be made. Big Apple's dealt with gang war and back-alley treaties since before the towers or trains. If she's taught him two things and two things only: one's how to talk, and the other's this: secret truces – Anarch, Camarilla, every faction in-between – are the way opposition is taken down in Jyhad. The contracts that make you hide them, the pacts that make you look over your shoulder and whisper behind your hands, are the deals that pay.

This story would change a great deal over the next decades of his life. They were Sabbat bombers. They were Camarilla double-crossers. They were Kuei-jin Tong. The story could change when the enemy did – and if you're a leader worth his weight, if you're smart and you're smooth, you better be able to change, too.

It's not something people say anymore, not really – but for him, it will always carry an aftertaste of hate.

He guesses he got what he deserved.

"_You got dealt shit, honey, and you don't deserve it,"_ she'd told him once – a jaw-pat, a twirl, white-powder and gun-powder and heartbreak of canary braid in his face. Nines's hackles bristled up in the riverside townhouse they fronted. Gold knots, danger-sense. Years of brains on shower porcelain, pistol metal in his hand; of how she'd smoke and suck at her canines, casual contempt; three wrinkles; a woman's voice saying _don't catch another sunrise_; you know what you are. "_You were a smart kid, junior. Too smart for your own good. But all that fresh blood in your body, baby, and mad as it can let you get, you're still just a smart fucking kid. And now you're my kid. Don't you ever fucking forget it."_

Her neck was thin. Terrible thin, fox bones under too much hair. The head could fit in his hands, the skull couldn't subsist. _Pop-pop-pop_. It'd come off like curtain rungs, like the red splatter in the floor he woke up on that night, like the hardwood pressing lines under his cheek. He couldn't breathe. He was full of cold. Too full of cold – it was a sear, an inflammation, something that cooked. Everything was too sharp and too full since one smart kid got up somebody else with nothing in his lungs.

"_But let me tell you something"_ - and she always did. There was a second ring of obsidian gelled around the blacks of her eyes. The shoulders of her coat, half the height and girth of his, browner suede than uniforms or armor. Gunshots in shoes. Her teeth grinned but didn't smile. _"You ever do what you're thinking about doing, kiddo. Angel, blue eyes, darling. You ever think it a little too hard, and I'll axe your fuckin' chest open, and I'll take your heart in my hands, and I'll squeeze all that blood back out."_

It brought her too close; too sharp. He had never been afraid of somebody's teeth.

"_Don't forget it, baby,"_ she reminded him, gently. She pinched his ear and she kissed him.

He's slit jugulars and snapped backs and broke knees and kicked heads in. He's lit homes on fire and stuck jagged things in eyes. God knows he's shot enough folks. But of all these violent crimes, the sin that gets him most is the smiling, the befriending, the procurement of people to die instead. Rochelle will look at you that same way if you've got something precious or useful, but she's a loudmouth and a tycoon and she can't do it like he can. When it comes down to a wire, half the devotion in their outfit is being afraid of his Sire. She's a terrifying person. And she knows how to talk, but not when to shut up – and that's her persuasion problem – and you can't teach somebody how to do it without opening their mouth.

That's what she keeps her Childe around for more than anything else these years. That's why – more than possession or jealousy or debts or the way Tommy bled-out on the asphalt in '41– she did what she did to him that night with the machete in midsummer of 1942. But it is what it is, and they are who they needed to be. He earned what he got. He's done what he's had to, maybe a little more.

It's not something they say in Chicago too often – a city of lightening, lakewater, pig wheel deaths.

People like them can't afford to take chances unless they're ones planned in advance. Vin doesn't bother saying much else on the subject; a risk had been confirmed. He about-faces, squeaky soles and sunburnt neck, back into his office room. The Brujah follows closely. He hops the counter, boots over a box, doesn't pick up the papers that fell.

"What are we doing?" Rodriguez wants to know, because despite species dynamics and titles, Chelle still wants a less powerful man calling the business shots. Vin shoves his typewriter aside to reach the only telephone. The ghoul's blood vessels were all drained; he'd gone paste, tightrope, like a spook. Panic is catching and the response is more important than the damage already done.

"The fuck do you think?" he barks. There is a thump and a scatter when an address book tumbles from an overstocked shelf and onto the floor. Glasses clink inside a hanging scotch cabinet. The record vinyl skips. "I'm going to get her on this phone. If you heard right, if Don's not talking out of his ass, he's not the end of our problem and sure as hell isn't going to be the end of theirs. Sheriff with a candy name isn't going to scare these people off. She's got to get out of wherever she is right now. They're going to tear that place to shreds. They're going to blow it to kingdom come."

It is a game that everybody plays. Whether you play it with a knife in your hand or soldiers with knives in theirs is just a matter of talent, handsomeness and age. _"All you got to do is act it," _she'd swear. _"You don't have to mean shit or love nobody if you can act like you do."_ Apparently he was a pretty good actor. And he doesn't know what Perfect State means or how free it is, because he's somebody's soldier, too – but there are other things a kid does know, even if one of them isn't how to feel about Rochelle Adrieux. But it's time – maybe right about now – to figure it out.

"Wait," he says.

It's a little too convenient, a little too uncanny, to be anything but destiny or a great big fucking joke.

"Wait-what?" The plunk and wind of the dial with forefingers in it is a harsher sound than makes sense. That _wait_ had been strangled. Vin is fraught and furious over the mess of his workspace, with a receiver up to his ear. His sweat leaves an imprint on the patent black monochrome. He has a waistcoat on too tight. "Wait for what? What the fuck am I waiting for? There's no time to sit on this. We've got to make sure this gets-"

"What if we didn't?" kiddo asks – _baby_, _trigger, roscoe, sunshine; _two dozen other nicknames meant to burn much as they loved. _Darling_ with a Colt in her fist; _Sugar_ with a shiv poking your throat. Vin had seen her take a shotgun from a honey-pie and break his nose with it. This what-if was a hypothetical, a dry mouth wonder. Her Childe stands there with his hands at his sides; fear and urgency had fallen solemn through the ghastly shade of an almost-human face. He looks older now, but it's always the same smart kid under the hat and holsters and the shyster coat.

Vincent's expression is madness and bewilderment with the phone in his hand.

"This isn't," he vows, but it is – and it had been – and it would be, with no other question, until the sun went back up over the Atlantic. It had been about this ever since the severance started, with every mutter of discontent, after they both signed their lives away to one monster who was now a half-country away. "This isn't something we're talking about."

It isn't fair and it isn't karma and it doesn't claim to be anything else.

The telephone rings in Harlem six, seven times. Nobody picked up. Vin curses, paces, then scratches hard at his hair until silver ruffles up through the bitter-coffee shade of brown. He bangs the receiver down.

"Sheep-fucking worthless piece-of-shit Sheriff. Two minutes. Two minutes," he fumes. The lividness is yawning from his chin to his elbows, the perspiration collecting. There's a moth plunking into the window, stuck between screen and the grocery paper taped over it. "I'm calling back."

"Vin," kid says.

There is a tick in the room as the broken wall clock winds itself past twelve. There is a sharper tick in the center of his back, twisting, a familiar stitch of dread. Vin had felt that before. With a living man's pulse hammering the walls of his head, he couldn't not imagine her face. He saw it all the time, in-person and in the back of a dream – always the same way, always happy as a clam, always with nothing in the sockets of her skull. Couldn't be possible for eyes to be that void, he'd insisted, the same ones Alcantra had looked with one hundred years ago. They were a legacy of negative space, of caves. But even her predecessor's did not howl like hers.

Rochelle's gaze was damp coal, darker than the metropolis outside, darker than the muzzle he'd stared down twenty years back when she'd clicked a luger at her dead Sire's leftover ghoul, then bust a gut at his scream. _"I'm fucking with you, Vinny, sweetness, I'm just pulling your miserable goddamn leg."_ Vincent didn't know how the carpet ended up under him; he thought he'd been shot. He thought he pissed himself. Her teeth were horribly, menacingly white, a little crowded, absolutely mean as they whipped back to laugh. She didn't ask or wait for him to get up. She sliced her hand with a bread knife and squeezed it tight, dribbled blood all over his kitchen tile. He could still taste the hemoglobin and slaked lime. _"Here you go, bunny, and better not waste it. I'm feeling charitable in light of my grief. But I ain't Mansel, and I ain't your fucking mother. So drink up, you sorry son-of-a-bitch. Have a hit on me."_

"Don't – _don't_ fucking start with me." Vin hadn't lived this long letting himself think. He swallows. Her eyes are black, swear to God – some poison, some tar. Kid across that room doesn't move. His are abnormally large, the color of a sort of death.

It's not like the movies. Not often somebody goes out hollering and gasping, pawing their heart, pushing scarlet back into themselves. You lose consciousness when you die from a stab wound. Your mind drains out like your fluids and you float out of the world. You go dead-weight and sluggish. Even with your meat all hacked up and flakes of lung in your mouth, dying this way starts to seem smooth as the chemicals and liquids run out. It's a quiet, slithering process. That's what it's like to let a knife kill you; Rodriguez has seen it happen more times than he remembers, and felt it just once.

"Just let it lie, Vin," the kid whispers, making it sound easy, like a prophecy, or maybe a song. "Let it alone. Let it be."

They are standing like that when the telephone rings.

It isn't always a plan.

It is just how some things turn out.

It isn't the Sabbat that kill Rochelle Adrieux. That's the film reel, the dramatic story, the one that ends in a dynamite _boom_ and a shower of concrete. She knows how to watch her ass and where to put the people who will better than any Kindred getting killed by radio-play villains. How it really ends is less clear, and less sudden than that. This wound has been seething, seeping, for decades in a woman's open side. It isn't the benzene and it isn't the flame. It isn't the duplicity of a Camarilla Sheriff too comfortable in his own part of town. It's the harvest a fear-over-love leader reaps. It's the slow ooze of a blade in your liver; the droplets of blood a ghoul licked off the lead paint; the leak of a machete stuck in his chest bone as a kid died on the floor with dinner on the table and a newspaper in her hands.

It is Nines Rodriguez who stopped Vincent Cappo in the middle of a bombing in 1956. It is Nines Rodriguez who makes that abstract phrase into something gunpowder, something gasoline, something awful, something real.

If you're a righteous soul with morals that want to think it – if it's a better story, a better way to die – then it is Nines Rodriguez who kills Rochelle Adriuex.

When the telephone rings – when Vincent reached to grab it – he steps forward. There is no telling why. He could've shot, could've stabbed, could've picked up that typewriter and bashed it over the more-human head until there was nothing but froth inside. He sure as hell didn't need a better reason. He'd sure as hell learned it from her.

Maybe that was why he didn't have to.

Nines Rodriguez stopped taking orders when he stops Vincent's hand on the phone. It was an understanding, a pact, that hovered. It asked. It was a burning blue sort of cold.

Vin lets it sit, lets it be.

The ghoul backs away to the farthest wall. They spend those last couple minutes looking at each other, two kinds of breathlessness, empty floor, silence the anesthesia of what they have just not-done.

_You know what this is, baby?_ she'd asked his body from the living room chair, blood spurting, spine twisting, spots on the nylon of her legs. _"This is what happens to smart kids like you who forget what they are. It's kind of poetic, a writer could say. And you know I'm all about poetic justice. _ _See, kiddo, sugar, angel-eyes: when you _fuck_ the person who made you, occasionally, it comes back to bite your ass in the worst possible way. Maybe your beer's full of cyanide. Maybe your car goes over a bridge. Maybe somebody cuts your own baby's head off, slaps a wedding-white bow on it and mails it to your doorstep. Kind of pretty, horrible as it is. That's the kind of revenge fits in a beautiful way. But this? This is more my style. This is how they pay it back in the big leagues out East. This is what you do when somebody you trusted, somebody you cared about, hits you right in the face and sticks a knife in your guts. _

"_They call this,"_ she said, _"a Harlem sunset." _

It's the best kind of justice there is.

It is August third of 1956. Harlem burns up when the sun goes down.

* * *

**HARLEM SUNSET**

_I'll meet you tonight under the moon.  
- from The Cocoanuts (1929)_

* * *

**_Author's Note:_ If Rochelle doesn't scare at this point, I just don't know.**_  
_


	2. Killing Snakes

**Killing Snakes**

It's one of the first real things he learns.

Snakes die two deaths: the one you cause – when you pull off their head or separate their spine, the tongue of your boot welling with toothmarks – and the one you see. The first time is quick, a single bullet or a bloody chop. The second lasts. The second death is the death that makes them lurch, twine, snaps the small latched backbones, rolls fine diamond heads in dirt. That's the one grabs every hose of their long, catgut innards and twists them into love knots like a shipyard rope. That's the one that ends it. That's the one that makes them pay.

Every time a snake bites, she tells him – and at the time he's not sure if it's science, a saying or somebody's religion – some of that venom is left in the vein. It pools there for years. The sick gnarled rattlers and the fat water moccasins reach their size from the kills they've made, peel their color from the blackness of personal history. That evil makes their whole body swell, fills up saddlebags on either side of the brain.

When a snake dies, their heart will stop, and suddenly the organs can't hold it in anymore. All that poison releases back into the meat that made it. It spills like a flash through the head, a madman dance down their spine, when all the nerves pop and shriek and fry. You think it's a last throe of life, the muscle memory flailing. But the second death is more than that. It's the price of toxin – all those mismatched fights, all those murders in tall grass, all those killing lies – come back to burn everything clean. There's not much justice in the world. But there is fire and there is pain in the green of a dead snake's eye.

He has caused a lot of snakes to die – crawling on their bellies, or walking on their feet. The number of legs or the color of coat never matters. They all spit and coil the same. You can see a devil well up and kill it again until every scale gasps and every stitch lays flat and limp and cold.

He guesses he'll die two deaths, too.

If there are two things Nines Rodriguez knows – knows now or knew then – it's how to kill snakes, and what to expect when one kills him.

She told him a lot of things like that in the time they were together. They weren't the hoping kind of stories – the nighttime ones with seacliff mansions, caballeros, willow trees, orient war or men with slanted swords. They weren't the romances. Not the mysteries, sleuth tales, parables or poems. They weren't the stories everyone wants. They weren't the stories anyone wants – but what you _want_ is a mendacious notion, some rich untruth, a trickster in more ways than the biblical or the banks would let you know. She was an honest teller. Those weren't the sorts of cloud castles she built.

She didn't do much fiction. She told hard, hurting, dog-eat truths.

What she _told_ were the things a boy needed to fear, a woman knew, and a man better hear if he was going to mean something in the gold-rush nothing out-west. He can't remember all of them, and the echo where her voice was is a tin space inside the walls of his ribs. But the important ones are still there, even though the texture is gone, even though he's forgotten most, even if he can't recall who said them or how her dark lashes turned to copper on a cargo car in middle-country sun.

She is the most sober person he has ever known.

There's a million details he's lost now, sand in a dustdevil; but some of them stick, and this is one. Her look was the same kind of clever old coyotes have. Her build was scrappy and purposeful and aware of its slight margins. Her gate was that startling stomp of flat-footed leaders who walked with great confidence, who picked their way down dirt paths and cornfields full of fangs. She wore a coat when they travelled, and he holds on to that, too: battered beige leather than hit at her shins, drew her a strong, sullen figure somewhere in-between woman and man. There were so many days spent trotting behind. Her hair was the endless, limp browned black of deserts, not like his; he would follow it when they walked long roads, red light scorched through the rough ends, a bird-color of loons on glasswater lakes. He'd follow the sound of her shoes on packed, parched earth that melted to blood when it thundered. He'd follow until they stopped at the next farm with work and watch her lean face for a _yes_ or a _no_. Unlaughing, unjoking, ungirlish. She rarely smiled and never with teeth – ashamed by a punch of blackness, her chipped right incisor, or more likely ashamed of who cracked it.

It wasn't meanness. It was just the person she was. Sober woman, sober bones. Even when she drank, whisky from paper, she was sober – did not tickle, did not squeal, did not say what she'd think until everyone was silent and she was utterly sure. Her mouth was thin and fierce and straight. Her tall linen skirts were eggshelled with dust. Her stare was two points of gray-stone, adamant blue.

He called her Marcela. She didn't like ma'am. He hadn't figured out she was his mother until he was seven, eight years old.

It's an unusual thing to realize the woman you follow is the same one who birthed you, who carried you inside, who lay down in a migrant pergola and tore you into the world before you killed her. It hit him suddenly and with the weight of a gas tractor with big, gnashing grills. You can call that boy dumb if you please – with his lanky body, his dark hair, his own shade of gray-stone blue. Following her had always seemed like the natural thing to do. Thinking about why hadn't mattered, hadn't meant.

She made space for him. She brought him along. She'd wash his cuts and pluck off his bugs, share her canteen, stew unappetizing lemongrass teas when he felt woozy or weak. She found him food when he couldn't find it on his own, heat it when his stomach grumbled on fruit or greens. She washed their humble clothes in creekwater. She built them slumping shelters and tiny fires to sit beside when the wind would get spiteful and yowl. He would come to sleep when he cared to, no matter when she did – creep through squeaking crops, crickets scraping, into a pallet beside her, the little soft spot she'd make. He would swallow that tinny morning meal of the coffee beans she boiled in meat cans. He was never afraid to ask when he needed, and that's how they lived: moving, unrooted, unburdened, both feeling so much older than their young, handsome cheekbones let on.

Call it whatever you want. He has never known anybody like that, and hasn't loved anyone like that since.

The day David realized Marcela Rodriguez Arredondo is his mother was also the first time he nearly died. He doesn't remember everything about that day – the aftermath, the shitty games kids play, the shittier excuses behind them. He can't recall if he apologized to her or not. He was only a child, less than a decade grown, and sometimes children are stricken stupid by the most obvious things.

What he does remember is the vibrancy of that ground. Greenest thing you'd ever see, late June in a Missouri orchard – ryegrass, fescue, delicate baby leaves from the early bearing trees. None of the workers' boys or girls wore anything on their feet that time of year. They'd sprint through purple clover and yellowjackets with tough, awkward limbs, fighting each other in between hours, hauling back sticky tarp bags full of whatever grew there. It was peaches that summer – overripe, stout pink ones. He can't recall the name of the man who owned them, but he remembers the sweet rot-scent, the wing buzzing, and the big white-painted manor house on the crest of that awful-green hill. Marcela said they paid good wages. He didn't know anything about money. He only knew that the chicken hawks and the black-eyed Susans meant they would be heading north again, a wagon train from Oklahoma, a barge up the Mississippi, or – when she didn't want to travel with anybody else – a long, tiring sojourn through dogwoods and soy.

Lord, the things you do and don't remember make no kind of sense.

Maybe that was the hot season of 1914. He'd had one of those peaches in his hand. It was a damp, shady evening, grasshoppers and dew on the legs of his trousers. He was standing under a bough to eat and not really watching or expecting anything. One of the things he absolutely can't remember is what kind of mindset it takes to stop, rest, and not feel badness bearing down.

You know, he never heard it. Rattlers are said to warn you off – a bulky, hideous snake with a terrible temper – but you learned their trill through the bluegrass like a death call, and it didn't happen here. Possible he was too busy swatting hornets off the sugar on his arms to notice. Possible something hacked its tail tip off, a brush hog blade or shovel nose. Maybe that one just had a taste in its mouth for the blood of a stupid boy. He can't tell you if a snake acts to be wicked or if it's just in its nature to be a wicked thing.

What he can tell you is the sound of that hiss. When a snake speaks – whether it's a fork-tongue or smooth words through too-white teeth – fresh air makes venom crackle at the back of its throat. Go on and dub that one an old farmer's tale. He thought so, too; brushed it off, called poeticism. This is one of the things you might be told, but that you don't feel, that you don't _know_, until you learn for yourself. Hike bare-foot in the dustbowl. Get to a city, one with towers and smog, one where short-haired women in black suits walk on knives and everybody grins like they've got something sharp. Find a million-dollar man in a thousand-dollar chair and get him to talk. These are the people who hiss from the heart. Listen close; you'll hear it. Then you can tell him what's real and what's not.

That sound was enough. The boy knew what was there before he needed to look. He lowered his fist dripping with the pit inside and saw it.

It was a massasauga. A thick, gnarled, glittering weave of serpent laying in the cool shade. Biggest one he's ever seen – arrowhead skull; crosshatched back, gorgeous and scarred; ferocious, insulted brows. These are the snakes good Catholics dream about, that kill horses and broil off men's calves, the kind with bites that turn you to charcoal before you crumble and die. These are the snakes that devour underweight, walking children with deep gazes and sad expressions. He could smell wet reptile. His toes were in the shadow of the twitching black tail.

It reared up – he swears this is true – looked him right in the face, told him _you'll die, boy, you're going to die_.

Snakes don't understand accidents, missteps, or do-what-I-have-tos. They are easily angered and easily bruised. It's the way their country makes them, stuck between vultures and wolves and rakes; creatures like that can't forgive, cannot _let-be_ once some lines are crossed. They take it personal. They wanted repayment, a pound of flesh. They were not reasonable no matter what they promised. And maybe it might've been personal or it might've been fate, but David had stepped on that snake and he hurt it, and it wasn't going to let him free.

He couldn't swallow or move or throw the peach in his hand, hope it would snap. He _could_ reach down and touch its beads. He could feel all the fine hairs stand up on his back and was mesmerized by how fast fruit turned to death in his mouth. He could remember the hate in its glower. Those eyes were the vilest green.

Green with no lids– corruption, venom, capitalism – three horsemen that never blink.

_This is how I die,_ David thought. He was six, seven years old and he could see himself go still and stop in the orchard below that pristine white house. He didn't want to faint or fall over. He would lay down, carefully, his ankles turning black and his lungs pulling apart, right in the dew of this grass; the snake wouldn't matter by then; and he would stare up, fill up with the blue in a cloudless five o'clock sky. They could bury him right here. Or maybe they wouldn't need to bury him, at all – maybe the loose dirt would yawn, wrap him in, make everything sink until there was just that bark smell and sleep. He'd breathe shallow breaths to keep his blood moving slow. He wouldn't scream and cause a fuss. He'd make it last as long as he could.

When the _bang_ came and his skull rang, David thought he'd been bitten, thought he'd been killed, but it was Marcela from nowhere with her gun in her hand. Black metal, wooden grip, foreign make; the one she kept under the bedding, the one that looked like a rebel. She fired, and the bullet blew its body in two. He saw the head come off that snake at the neck. And the neck, he swears, the neck stood gaping at him another ten seconds before falling over, like it didn't know its brain was gone, like it was waiting for the real death.

Veins spurted one good spurt. The vertebrae danced in the grass where he'd dropped the peach to cover his ears with his shirtsleeves. Barrel smoke, that far house, the dead look on Marcela's face, the figure-eights tangling in the orchard blades. He couldn't understand but he understood everything then.

She slapped him for not looking out for himself, and he started to cry. So she slapped him again, and the warmth of the nose blood mixed with the tears tasted like mother, felt like life.

Marcela's stories: two times to kill a snake, crawl down in a ditch if a twister roars, how to tell when a white man cheats, what to bring and what to leave forever when you run.

He didn't know where his mother came from, that day or any day; he didn't know how she got that Argentine gun, who his daddy was, or what she bled through soles to leave behind. But he does know she never left him.

There are a lot of them out there. Snakes, that is: copperheads; pit vipers; cottonmouths with bleached, taunting gums; sidewinders, ridge-nosed and tiger-striped; puff adders; corals. It's not just the ones that boast and rattle. Some of them are a quiet kind of hate, a vicious kind of mean, the sort that slither into a baby's bed and tap at its ears. Some lunge for the shins and other flare. Some will shy away for cover with the vibration of your march; some'll come running for it, curious, crazy-eyed. There are different ways to deal with different dangers. "Know your enemy," that's what they say – and here, they got it right.

If you're going to get bit by a snake, you better find out what kind of snake it is.

_Know your enemy_. See your first death coming and recognize its mark. Have a plan for the second one: to stave it off, make it matter, drink in what's left of what's still blue. That's a hard order when there's so many snakes out there, but sometimes, what's hard and what's smart is it's all you've got to live off – when the person in your face feels gone, looks different, and the things you knew aren't so sure you know them anymore.

ooo

Here's one he remembers:

When David was eleven, maybe twelve, they went to live in a labor camp just north of the Ohio River Kentucky border. David liked living in the camp. Marcela didn't like it so much. The place was sharecropped between three overseers and went on for miles: pretty rows of beanstalks, pepper bush, potato peels, beets. Menacing pines surrounded them in needle-cone acres on every side. You'd have to cut through those dark trees to the railroad, on horseback or car, but the horses were for plowing and none of them had cars. What they had was sun and workers and seeds that did pretty well. It was a decent prairie farm. It was all let out by a Mr. George Gussie who lived in a mammoth townhouse with his family outside Evansville, some four hours away.

Each overseer had a cute country home on a corner, and set between was the dormitory – _The Hands' Building_, they called it – robin-egg blue, ten windows, two-stories high.

He was lucky that thing hadn't collapsed in the whole year-some they spent there. It was a badly-shingled, moaning flophouse that shrieked in storm wind and had only one pot-bellied stove for the bunch of them inside. There were no rugs to speak of. The air flow was too scant to rush out heat but uninsulated against winter chills. It was a barren place, a temporary place, a place people swept in-and-out of – but it had floors and walls and the ceiling didn't leak, and sometimes that's enough.

David liked that they had a room. It was a drearish, lowly, claustrophobic room now that he thinks of it again: one bedframe, one cabinet, no natural light blinking in. They couldn't fit a table so usually ate outside. Always stunk of iron, sweat, and lard – a haze from the sparse, creaking-wood common room where their neighbors fried bacon that tormented his guts. Marcela found a tin trough to use for a bath, and it lived leant up against the only free corner they had. But she kept it clean, kept it safe, and kept it. They'd sleep with that gun under a pillow, a knife in the mattress crease. They had a hundred mundane things to squabble about, see to, get done.

He was never sure how many different last names shared The Hands' Building, but there were twelve bedrooms on each floor, and more hands than could fit. Tents went up for those who couldn't get a roof; any given night, you'd find young people sleeping on hay mats outside, stitching hammocks to evade the beetles and ants. That was a rough patch for other mothers' sons, though. They had a place to be.

There were a lot of other kids at that camp, some boys and some girls, some his age and some older. Italian, Negro, Polish, a fair number like him. He can't remember anybody's name, but he can remember a Jewish girl who used to pick up pond frogs and put them on you, who was always giving people dandelions, who died of scarlet fever in December and gave everybody a contagion scare. They burned up the room she had. Good god, he didn't know what a Jew or a pogrom was.

That camp was the first time he can recall having friends. David was tongue-tied a lot of the time, a product of his personality and not his intellect – whipcrack skinny, somber look, the kind of boy writers want to write about – but he liked having other small bodies around, and they didn't judge too harsh. They were the wretched children. He didn't know that at the time.

Other things he didn't know: free market, naturalization, slaughterhouses, census papers, anarchist, strikebreaker, wetback, union mills, why you shouldn't practice kissing with a girl named Daisey-May Booker (even though Daisey-May Booker kissed everybody), why they lit another girl's baby blankets on fire after she got sunk in the ground. How come we move so much? How come George Gussie lives in too many rooms with his Evansville family and I only have this one? It's the things a kid doesn't know to ask that keeps them from wanting to kill people, to catch a death and die.

What he did know was snakes. What he did know was how to drift through being poor.

Another thing David knew was how to read. They did it together, but never by that house, and never by anyone else. Or _he_ read; she'd have him stand behind as her quick fingers pinched green beans, sundown warming his back, stumbling over the periodicals some of the campesinos saved aside to pass around. Goldman, Baginski, Alexander Berkman and Grace Potter. Zucchini, strawberries, sour yellow pears. "And You?", eyed russets, "Vive Le Roi," Sacco and Vanzetti. She wanted to hear the English print articles and said he could make the words sound better than her. They still sounded awful, but now he knows what she meant, and why that's important to a kid with his face.

She never taught him much Spanish. No good to come from that; you are American, you are already there. _There_ – as though it was not the same wheat field or apple grove, as if he was on the other side of a river, thigh-deep and waiting for someone who wasn't going to come.

"_The King is dead,"_ he'd wobble, the heat of evening through the coarse cotton collar he wore, the bangs itching beneath his cap, the bees about to drink their sweat and snakes always underfoot. His hands would shake around the cheap, brittle paper as they always did when he tried to speak in this clear white out-nowhere sky. When things get hard, he learns, you have to be watching and you have to get smart. _"Then love and live and laugh and sing – The world is good and life is free – There's not a single care I know that's worth a single tear from me."_

David Rodriguez is an American boy, a woman's child; he has no accent and his look is far and grim and too blue for who they want him to be.

It was always too-something in Marcela's house.

"_Too many flies in here,"_ she'd curse, chase them out their door with a crack of towel, because they didn't have a window in their hotbox little room.

"_Too warm to go out there,"_ she's warn, and yell him back inside when some neighbor children tried to skate on the fishing lake. David was so mad at her that day. He watched them slip about and throw mittens full of snow at one another with a grumble and nasty language on the splintery stoop. He told her it wasn't fair, she wasn't thinking, and when he was a man she couldn't tell him what to do. Marcela said _aren't you going to be in trouble then_. It was maybe an hour before the ice cracked through and two of those kids froze to death on a too-warm February day.

"_Too much hair on your head,"_ she'd scold, affectionately, and scald her pocketknife in a kettle fire before taking it to the back of his neck. It always stung getting haircuts. The blade would invariably be a little too hot, and her petite, bony hands would pull. Marcela wasn't the type who smooched or hugged, but sometimes – usually in the middle of cutting his hair – she would take both his ears, hold his skull between her palms, and rest on the things she was trying to keep there, trying to leave.

He doesn't know how she did any of it at all.

It might seem unbalanced, these things he's telling you: how a kid can know so much and not know anything at all. It's not, though. It's the most normal thing can be. Being poor is all about knowing and not knowing. The poor are hard-scrabble, rough-knuckled, hard-working. The poor are wise and stupid and industrious and dour. More than anything else, the poor are ugly.

_Ugly_ doesn't mean the same thing as it does in that other place, though – doesn't mean what it means in Evansville, St. Louis, Chicago or sprawling California towns. David learned quickly there is more than one way to be ugly. It can come in the grain of your skin, the vice of your conscience or the violence in your marrow. It can come in machetes and canines and shotguns and knuckles full of brick. It can even come in purple lipstick and gunshot heels. Ugly is a damn good master of disguise. But because it's not always clear the ways ugly dresses up, you aren't often sure what you're dealing with; you can only be certain whether or not you are rich or you are poor.

One thing is certain: David Rodriguez is poor. Everyone he has known enough to call by name is poor. They are the dirt-bitten, black-haired poor – but Marcela is beautiful, even with her broken tooth, even with the horrible things she has done with four flat planes of their brown hands.

He knows now how his mother got herself that room, but at the time, _how_ wasn't something a boy with dry socks and down quilt worries about. It was a sore, hulking house. It was a horror house and David liked it. God damn him, he did.

He remembers the first man he shot, but he doesn't want to remember the second death, or the ugliness of that small room.

ooo

Here's something you ought to know about men like George Gussie.

The first time David saw Mr. Gussie – that was the name, if he didn't tell you before: _George Jeremiah Gussie_, _G.J. Gussie_, like his parents planned it, envisioned a catchy Hancock on the City Bank checks. If you can believe that unbelievable shit is up to you. Whether you buy it or not, the first time he saw Mr. Gussie, it was on the Clydesdale stable lawn, just about four hours after Evansville Protestant would've let out, between the blushing sweetbriar and a tomato patch. All three overseers knew he was coming and told everybody to stay the hell away. David had every intention of staying the hell away, but even from crouching in that patch, there was no way to miss what came. They all saw him screech up in a choke and a plume of vermeil dust. He stepped out of a Ford so black and so sun-shined you couldn't look directly at it, or pain would light up your eye.

He's kind of fat, Mr. Gussie. Kind of soft and kind of fat, with a spotless gray suit, squeaking leather shoes, a San Diego beard and a bowler with one pheasant feather stuck in. These things never bothered him then, but now there's a ripple in the memory, and a rattlesnake wearing a tie. You know, Nines doesn't think George Gussie ever noticed David Rodriguez existed, never knew him from Adam, and why the fuck would he? – not until trod on, not until given a reason to kill.

But Nines had already been told snakes don't really need reasons to kill. They grow them instinctually, have them born-in, just like the toxins in the gunbarrel of fang.

What you should know about this kind of man is that, when he makes a routine, he'll stick to it. They like their laws, George Gussies. They like their fast, black Fords and their Sundays and their _way-things-used-to-be_s.

With all those other proper-order, money-bought, cool steel things, George Gussie liked Marcela, and every third Sunday of the month, he'd drive up in his fast black Ford, and he fucked David's mother in that shitty labor camp room

The poor are ugly – but not half as ugly as the ugly, rattling rich.

It's a difficult thing to be sick when you're young. Not the kind of sick with a flu or a cough, but that bones-deep sick – the low heat that radiates out, clenches everything, makes the liquids simmer, scratches shrieking with talon and claw at the insides of a cage made of ribs. You know that sick. In men, it makes you put your fist through the wall, makes you destroy, makes you make somebody hurt. In kids, it's a little different. There are some like to blame that on the DNA that he'll get someday, on politics, on being Brujah. _Brujah blood_ – people say so with scorn or with pride, but most of it's bullshit, a good excuse to be clannish and crude. Nines knows he's felt that monstrous kind of sickness a long time before feeling the other one. It's part of being a wretched child, and of learning, gradually, surely, inescapably, what you are.

At the age of twelve, or whatever he was, a kid's switchblade is still dull, his truths still hazy. David doesn't understand a lot of bad bargains the world asks you to make. He doesn't know what concession means and never heard the word rape. He's more pissed off than worried when Marcela tells him to go somewhere else for a while, find some more work, don't come back until late. She's got that offhand way of calling you lazy. But if he'd watched the tall grass harder – if he'd been taught that one grim, terrible notion: _compromise_ – maybe what happened to three ugly people that summer Sunday wouldn't have, and who knows where on earth they'd all be.

That's the useless hindsight Nines doesn't like having. He hasn't thought about this in a real long time, and he won't for another – so maybe by the next, more will have been lost to him, memories buried in a hundred years of snakes.

But for now, here it is: what he remembers, what is left to tell.

The night he shot George Gussie had been a beautiful goddamn Sunday. Mild sun, kind breeze, the sort that blows cotton around and rolls pretty waves on shallow water. He had almost caught a great big bullhead that morning – broke a cane pole, snarled a line, wrestled free and all that fish plopped right back in the lake. It got a spur in and his thumb bled like a bitch. Can't remember that burnt little girl's name, but he can remember a dinner he didn't eat. Go figure that one. Go figure it's the meaningless shit that sticks.

David went home hungry that evening. He could recall being angry. Hunger'll do that to you, and the whole country felt it bite keen a decade later, but this was the petty trashcan-kicking kind of anger boys stoke up when they want to steam. He lunked the half-mile back to The Building in a sunset looked like watered wine. He trudged through turnips with heavy feet, daring the snakes not to flee, huffing things like _goddamn no-count sunnuvabitch_ because it made him feel better to talk like a man. Jesus, he'd brained a lot of copperheads by then. Sometimes David thought he'd kill 'til they thinned out and left. You know, he's not even sure why he was such a stormy little bastard on a beautiful day like that, but there it was, and here it is.

Another thing Nines has learned: never judge where the fire is from a field away. Don't shrug, squint and brush it off. He's already mentioned how brilliant and how light-toed evil can be; everybody has their own story on that, their own teeth in the grass, the one they wish they stopped to see. That's a lesson. Sometimes the glow is more than just embers; sometimes the rope is a venomous snake; sometimes the mist is deadly smoke. Do not let it lie to you. If you smell ash, you follow it. Even on the beautiful days.

Don't judge from a field if there's a fire. Get close. Stand outside the door. You can always tell when something is wrong.

He's never remembered exactly what happened next.

Here is what must have: David heard something, something awful, a thing he didn't want to learn and didn't understand. He opened that door and he went in the room and he saw George Gussie on his mother and then that black-metal gun was in his hand so he shot George Gussie, shot him onto the small square of ground. There was redness flowering and everything went real slow. Marcela sat up and maybe she said something with her blouse gaping and her insignificant left breast and her broken front tooth but he couldn't see her. George Gussie was coiling, twisting, all that toxin and all those hideous ugly colors spilling out. He was gushing the floorboards and hissing _you'll die, boy, you're going to die_ so David walked up real calm and real clear and shot him again, in the head this time, where you fire when you kill a snake. By now he's living in nothing at all. The tiny, horrible room has fallen away, his mother's fallen away, and it's just him standing there with the black Molina and brains all over the ground.

He's learned this: a gunshot isn't the same when you deal it and when you don't. It isn't a _BANG!_ or a bell or a shattering if your own hand's on the hammer and your mind's gone lucid and sharp. Two shots: _pop-pop_. Two shots and the king is dead – he'd heartless, mindless, done twice dead – and David's killed a man, a rich white Ford-driving man, a man with a family house in Indiana who owns the miserable little hole they sleep in and likes to think with the brains plastered outside of his head that he also owns all of them.

A snake dies two deaths. An American boy has nowhere and everywhere to go.

And now she's screaming, no – he's screaming – and there's wet all over the fat corpse on the floor, a butchered, reptile color, and he'll _die, boy. _They're going to hang him; he's going to be burned in a fire like that little girl was. He feels he can't breathe. _Maybe I'm already dead_, David thinks, _they already killed me_ – but it's Marcela's fingers sealing his mouth, clamping, pushing the scream back in. She's kneeling on the floor between him and George Gussie's meat and pinching his nose and begging him _shh_ and her eyes are full of blue and blood. There's unhappy feet outside and somebody shouts and she shouts back. _"Fine,"_ she says; it's all fine, everything's right, too much liquor, boy spooked himself. It's all right. He can't get any air and can't look at that wilted mass on the boards.

Maybe they know what goes on in this room better than he ever did. Those feet must go away, because David doesn't die yet. It's dark and adrenaline has collapsed, leaving nothing, not even moonglow; there's not enough space between these walls. George Gussie lays there inert and terrifying, scarier than a wealthy man ever was alive. Nothing moves. He can smell the powder and hear wheezing from that jaw a bullet opened up. Marcela holds his mouth shut for he doesn't know how long. It's only her breathing and the mirror of her eyes. He doesn't know where the light in them comes from.

It is a real kind of a thing to kill a man – the realest thing there is.

When you do something that real, and this is the funny part: it doesn't _feel_ real in the time that it should. It doesn't feel real when the slick reek is still on your clothes and everything inside your chest has gone. That's a self-preservation tactic, he's learned; the body gets slack and sure and shivering so it can do whatever's needed to get away. It wants to last as long as it can, you see. David stood there in the death he brought, stopped and still, trying to drink up the blue in his mother's eyes like he was going to drink up sky though orchard trees. When she peels her hand away, not certain if he can hear any _shh_ she told him, it isn't glistening blood; it's the saliva and the stuff that's run from his nose. There's a splatter on the washtub, a crater in the bed. He keeps wondering why he isn't unmade and why he isn't dead.

Some things you can't leave forever, not even when you run as long as she has.

George Gussie is still there in the wet part of the floor.

You should let a dead snake lie. That's not because they deserve it – merit some kind of respect – but because even a decapitation can still be dangerous. There might be poison there still licking. David doesn't want to touch him but he has to. God he doesn't want to touch him – all that damp skin, all that fat – but Marcela can't move a murder on her own. She's got her elbows levied beneath the flopped weight of his pits, the smashed cup of skull beneath her chin, heels digging down; _help me, _his mother tells, _we have to do this_, so he does. They struggle and labor and heave in the quiet malevolent dark. He doesn't understand how she can look so wild and be so methodical. He's followed her this far; there is nothing else for him to do.

They can't move him. A second death in, a snake this size, is too heavy to hide – all the venom's erupted to make flesh sluggish, swollen, large. She gives up the battle. He drops the man's perfect leather shoes.

_Wait_, Marcela tells him. Her toes are silent outside the creak of their door.

He is alone in that room for a forever. Every pore howls. He knows what is in here. He can't tell if his eyes are opened or closed.

Marcela comes back with a fire axe and she takes George Gussie to pieces: arms, legs, torso, head.

David sees none of this. It happens, and he watches, but he sees none of it – a void blot on what's too real. There is only a sound. It's an anything-sound. It's the put of a motor bouncing over road bumps still far away. It's the coal being shoveled downstairs. It's the thump of shining black leather shoes: clip-clop-clip-_chop_. It's all of those and it's none of them. There is just the whistle of steel when his mother brings the hatchet high over her head.

God help him forget that sound and that horror-house room.

When it's done, they stuff it in lime bags. Everything fits. They sink George Gussie in a fine white powder, bit by bit, bundle him up, let the Ohio carry this away. Then they run another time. They run straight through those witching-tale woods, fingers grabbing other fingers, filthy, not bothering to look or watch or see. They run until daylight, until the railroad tracks. They run until they can't bear to run anymore, and then they wait for a cargo train, one slow and poor and corroded enough not to head anywhere important, nor to wear any locks on the empty last cars.

Nines doesn't really remember that run. He just knew he was out of that room, out of that house, out of that field – and that time, it was plenty enough for him.

What he remembers is the morning. Morning is when you always remember, when your mind comes back to you, maybe why he can't remember things like he used to anymore.

That gilt Monday morning, the morning after he shot a man and fled from the gore, Nines remembers the rumble of track – the groan of wheels, the shudder of it, the way brown paint molts a red clay color like the ends of her hair. He remembers the Oklahoma wheat rushing past in glee-gold. He remembers Marcela sitting on the lip of that car with one leg out and the light on her face. It's a harsh kind of day, a face-the-music day, one where nobody can sleep and nobody wants to think. Their minds and hands are empty. He stands with his arms hugging his sides in the opposite end of the car. They don't speak.

They don't speak, and they don't sleep, and it seems like maybe they'd never do any of those normal things again. But then David – god damn dumb fake-American boy – David starts smiling. He starts smiling because it's so horrible, because it's so foul, and then she does, too – and then they are laughing, laughing because the king is dead, laughing because they chopped up George Gussie like firewood and threw him into a river dressed in dog-cheap burlap – and because when things get that bad, he's learned, there's nothing else left but to taste the blood and drink the poison and show your teeth and laugh.

He calls her mama after that. She thought maybe she'd never really mind.

ooo

How many years that was, Nines can't say. It's another thing lost, another detail bled out to finish, snakeprints curling in sand. He can't remember which state she died or what from or where he buried her. He can't remember the weight of that Molina in his hand when it was still somehow justified. He can only say he followed Marcela everywhere – at a distance, shuffling feet; _keep walking, __niño__, or start running_ – and thought no one would've known he's her son were it not for the look split between them, the unfine metal color cupped inside their sockets, lashes, lids.

_I am so damn sick_, he'd sometimes say – on the side of a road, in the middle of a cornfield – a rattle in his ears, a big stick held tight, looking for a dead body to kill it again. Little voice, little boots, little hates. _I am so damn sick of all these snakes. _

"You're too small to be sick," Marcela'd tell him. He knew the handgun was right in her coat and not to be scared. But he couldn't help talking ugly, and he couldn't help being sick.

"I don't care. I hate them. They never leave. Son-of-a-bitch. Son of a _bitch_." He'd cuss, and she wouldn't care like she sometimes did, not this time, and he'd be hitting the wild reeds, stamping his heels, listening for a hiss, hoping it would scream. "These goddamn sneaking pieces of shit. I want to kill them. I want to kill every last goddamn one of them; I would if I could, you know, I would. They can't act decent. Can't be like the rest of us are. There's never one and then _bang_, that's it, that's all. They never just die. I hate it," he swore, "I _hate_ it."

When _them_ became _it_, Nines doesn't know. He isn't sure what happened on all of those roads or in all of those rooms – where all the snakes are, where the dead ones fell, where the live ones are still hissing and swelling up in green wicked eyes. He knows what is. He knows what he's learned. He knows what he has to do.

"So kill them," she said.

That's the thing he remembers. That's the first thing he knows how to do.

* * *

_**Author's Note**_**: Working on a bit of spoken flow here; as with his segments in **_**Byzantine Black**_**, the grammatical mistakes and the crappy handle on adverbs is intentional. Hopefully this segment will feel congruent with – and maybe illuminating on – his characterization in BB. **

**Thanks for reading, for your comments and any other forms of support! They are always welcome, and they are always appreciated.**

**P.S. This chapter is about as close as I'll come to bringing Woeburne into these, I swear. **


	3. One to Lead

**One to Lead  
**

Some men are born with it.

There's a thing about men, about people, like that. They've got something more than the other sons-of-bitches do. You can't put a word on what the something is; you can't describe this to anybody else for fear of how it'd sound – and oh, you know how it sounds – but there's no question in the moment, in the faction, in the momentum of a cause. You know that kind of man. They are the ones history blots out but the people of now will remember. They are the listeners and speak-upers. They are the first wolves. They are the ones built up from courtroom injustice and canine cunning and ruthless, animal bones in their backs, cheeks, hands.

They are the ones you respect but don't decide if you like. They are the ones you are willing to hear. They are the ones you will nail your hopes in a breastplate and crusade for – and for whom, if asked, you will put down your sickle and die.

You're not a child. You're not stupid. But faith isn't something you question: it's something you feel in your guts, in your spine, in the depth of your throat where it'll itch when you're hungry and sick. _Brujah_. You're all hungry and sick for something. You westwind witches are a jaded breed of believers. You are all big and all bad and all mean – you all can get mighty precocious, mighty goddamn loud when you want to – so it's no wonder, maybe, that you'll look for the quietest man in the room. You'll believe in that man. You'll follow that kind of man – the kind who promises the harsh class of beauty, who doesn't need to beat-down, and doesn't need to shout. You'll follow the man whose stare hits you right in the stomach with the hardness of flesh and the metal he's made of. You'll kill for whoever can do that with a straight face or a sad semblance of a smile. That is the truth. And it's a truth that's so for more than just Brujah – one that was true before any of you ended up dead. You know that man; you've met him. You have seen and have touched what they are.

They are the ones who understand somehow – even if you've never really met, even if you've got doubts they gathered your name – who will look at you, through you, across a concrete street or an execution theater or maybe a shitty bar in downtown LA. A second and a glance is enough for men like that to seize conviction. Nobody gets you like they do. Nobody. You'll lay down dead for the one who, saying nothing, says this: _I don't have time for you, kid. I wish I did. I don't. But if I did, no one else could know you more than I would. I see you here. I am the same thing you are._

And you believe that – you know it – even if you haven't figured out exactly why.

They've got faces that are strikingly human. They've got good teeth. They've got little flaws that show, hurricane eye, scar on the mouth, monster bites, and big dark spots bled of what you don't see. They are the voices that hum in your head, that bother you at night, the ones who won't be forgotten about and can't be lawyered, shot, written away. You want to be more like them. Everyone wants to be a man like that. You want to understand everyone and have nobody understand the crime of what's under your _you_.

They are the creatures of large ideas and little patience. They are the ones with loose posture, busy mind, low volume, the simple appeals. They are a calm and ungentle man who does not waste his time.

You know who he's talking about. You know the way the angel city watches and loves and roars at night. You know Nines Rodriguez is that kind of man.

That kind of man is a leader. That kind of man is the kind that David – just David – is not.

"_WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU,"_ the man with the baseball bat asked him, and it's hard to answer a question like that when all you can see is your blood smearing ashwood and the squirm of live red in your mouth.

He still doesn't know for sure where they took him that night. He would come to know them. He would have to know, quickly, how they worked and what vice they ran and what kingpin they were running it for. He knows now, with the wisdom of hindsight, how Wes caught him; good tracker knows how to find a man who's shot yours. But the dockhouse David woke up in is a blur that smells of sturgeon fish and steel. The cement was wet. The ceiling had rotted an old barn brown that confused him. The colors were bland from mold and concussion. The ground was slick with oil, and it stained his – no, someone had stripped the coat – stained his shirt, a shredded white, neck buttons missing, sleeves slicked in crude. Rust and gravel bled his palms a very unpretty pink. There was a messy break down the back of his head; there was blood sticking the mussed black of hair to his neck; and he reached to feel, horrified of brains, clobbered too dumb to make five fingers work.

He was cold, David noticed, his first bolt of fear – a terrible cold. He couldn't see shit, and that scared him worse than the other thing. A Novemberish howl pushed in off the Mississippi and made everything sting. Each gust would jangle the big railroad chain across two warehouse double-doors, a fitful noise, something that shrieked and clanged like a banshee on a locomotive. He was on his stomach on the floor and his skull was throbbing. A thin glow, winter violet, peeked in beneath the bottom of these walls. It bit with river chill. It looked in like Siberia was out there. In that dying evening light, David could just see the outlines of his hands.

Somebody with a belly-voice and a blasé cough said: "You killed him."

"Glanced him. He'll come around," argued the man with the bat. David couldn't make out either of them. They were threats with no features in this dark gauze. They were gloved hands, nice shoes. Each voice seemed indistinct and about a thousand miles underwater from where he sprawled on the concrete.

"Shouldn't clock them in the head. I tell you every other time we do this. If you want somebody to answer your questions, you shouldn't up and smack in half their goddamn—"

David stopped listening. He scraped his left arm close, then his right, and with both palms flat on the ground, gave a great mighty effort to lift his upper body. It hurt. Sour stone had purpled the whole side of his face: cheek, temple, chin. Needlepin cramps peppered over each rib. His arms were incredibly sore, shaking in the shoulder sockets, and the rest of him felt like a cut boat anchor. It was an agony to have to think, but he had to, and he did. _Get up, get up_. These men were going to kill him. And David struggled to heed that warning – struggled valiantly – but his skull was sloshing, his vision dim, and his elbows shook feebly under the meager weight of himself. He had a pistol in his pocket. Where was his pocket? He had three dollars and thirty-one cents in there. He had a key to the house María lived in. He had a piece of paper with a telephone number labeled _Saul._ He had a bed, a headcold, a place he needed to be at with money he wasn't going to make. He was not the kind of man that ends up here.

He was maybe seventeen. Maybe eighteen. To tell you the truth, the kid didn't look like much. He was uncomfortable. He was too skinny for his frame, like a slum track racehorse, and that made his limbs seem awkwardly long. Sunken cheeks; bruised lids. Both shoulders hunched and his neck dipped low from the consciousness of their height. Not a kid who smiled, who joked, too easily; there was a freckle on his cheek, a switchblade in his boot and a paper-thin moustache on his upper lip. He was a dazed-eyed, blue-eyed kid. He was a hungry kid. He always needed a haircut. His soles were cheap working leather and bad for a back. His clothes were gray, his coat was too short, his face looked like nobody beneath the brim of a flatcap.

He had been in St. Louis for a little more than a year.

David Rodriguez was maybe seventeen, maybe eighteen the night trouble started catching up to him. Trouble had taken a while. But that's sometimes how Trouble does; it'll walk after you slow, hike the scenic route, enjoy its trip. There's no hurry. You know you've done wrong. You know something is coming for you – something you can outrun for awhile, dodge a few times, but nothing that can really be undone. Once it gets you, you're got. And you've been so tired, waiting for it – waiting for the trap to snap – that when the teeth sink in, they're a kind of benediction, an almost-relief. Trouble won't always kill you right then-and-there. But whenever it does, wherever it does, if you're caught red-handed, trouble rides you to the end.

Nines Rodriguez does not need to write you the book on endings, he's sure.

It was a blustery October. It was the horror play kind of night when Adrieux's men got him, the old country sort that brickles your bones, shivers up your dog hairs, and makes everything seem possible. David had been working these docks a couple weeks with unreliable pay: it was a bully gig, stand there and look tough, outside a storage building not unlike the one they were killing him in. He'd stuff both hands in his trench and scowl when anybody walked by. He'd look like he could make good on an unsaid threat. He'd shot somebody three days before – shot _at_ somebody, more like – on twilight watch when a raid came by, tobacco in his mouth, penny coffee aftertaste, two pairs of socks, toes trying to keep warm. There wasn't much time to mull it over or recall he didn't actually care about protecting this place. Four men had been on duty, one facing each direction, backs on the glum rickety walls. They were all sleepy. They'd heard a lookout shout _here comes trouble!_, and click, bang, here it was. Somebody started firing an automatic and the white smog went up. David didn't think. He'd pulled the pistol, leaned around a scrapmetal gate, and fired all his bullets at the vehicle clattering towards them. Three missed. Rest slammed the windshield, the car flanked with a manic dead weight, and it all hurtled off the harbor lip, bubbled, sank.

It was Otto he killed. David learned that later. It was Wes and Lewy who came to scoop out the eye they were owed. He didn't hold it against Lewy. He held it a little against Wes.

"—to get anything. Weren't talking to me, anyway. Hey. Hey," slapped the man with the bat, remembering him, stopping the in-spat. His voice was real nasal – like a rap on a glass tank, a washrag in suds. David looked wildly after it and tried to draw the curtain away from his brain. He could just begin to see the hat was a homburg and the head beneath it was close-shaven, dark-haired, dispassionate. A Black Sea look and a cut in his ear. Darkish, crowish, little birdlike, even; you could never tell the guy's age, but his was the curved nose and flat expression of a bored career man who always closed-out business. A thumb and a forefinger snapped in fast succession. It sounded like an empty cartridge. He'd know later it must've been Wes. "Quit it. Quit dying; I didn't whiff you that hard. You want the next one in the knees? I asked you a question. I said what the hell are you?"

"I'm blind. I'm blind. I can't see anything," David said, partly a lie.

"Fuck you, kid. What did I ask?"

A shoe levied him over when his arms had buckled. He was on his back now; that made the broke kid's face feel better, but the vertebrae were shocked, and didn't take to concrete real well. The ceiling was too far away to be seen. Somehow he knew that he would pass out if the back of his head touched the cement, so David wouldn't let it; he craned to sit up, making it partway, suddenly queasy. He took shallow breaths through his mouth because little ones were the only kind that didn't hurt. He glared, terribly, at himself – down the front of his chest. It felt like someone sledgehammered his left side. In a stupor, as he was, you couldn't make sense of a bat. What was this stuff, thick and dark? Ink, Old River mud, his insides coming out? You couldn't tell through the smear and the dizziness and the humid fog of pain. Everything smelled like a canal barge. Oil, he thought, tasting it, breathing it – covered in oil – making his eyelids heavy, his legs slip, the lashes glue to saltwater from his ducts. _Where was he?_ Panic spiraled. They were sharks. They were going to kill him. They were going to drop a matchstick, light him on fire, chuck his corpse in the current and let it sweep a dumb kid way down into the Gulf. He was going to die. He was going to float to Louisiana and the gators were going to swallow his bones. _What are you? Who are you? Who is this happening to?_

"David," he said, because there was nothing else to give him and nothing else in the rattle of David's skull.

Answers like that are never enough. In the entire time Nines Rodriguez has been scaring the ghost out of kids, strangling snakes and getting confessions, this is the wrongest thing to say. You need to realize something if you've been given a role in an interrogation room, or if you're a spoke on a wheel. Nobody wants your name. Nobody wants your name, or your fear, or your sorries, or your best pretty-please. They have already decided who you are, and they did so before they ever got close enough to see the shadow of person in your face or the birthmarks on your body. _Who_ is not the question. _Who_ can mean anything. The question, and the answer, is always going to be _what_. You'd better understand this if you're going to be that kind of a man.

"I said _what_ the fuck are you, jefe. Which one are you with? I said where the fuck do you come from, you bumpkin piece of shit?" the man with the bat asks him, and he couldn't answer; it was an echo from someplace else. Something was buzzing. It was too late in autumn for flies. David swore that sound came from outside of him, but it couldn't have; his teeth were clattering in the jaw.

There was an oil barrel knocked over in the corner. There was an evil twang of cold spit and hot mucus and vomit in the swell of his mouth, the burn of gullet. He can't think. He doesn't know the name of the place he was born. "Nowhere," he said.

The other man scoffed: "_Nowhere_. Hit him in the ribs. This kid lies," Lewy gathered – scowling, smoking, the strongman type of fat. He had sort fingers in shorter, fingerless gloves. Had had better things to do. His brow was a bulldog wrinkle with two scowling beads in those mean, unhappy folds, and every time he exhaled, plumes sank into a sable ushanka. There was a crawl of frost in spider-veins beneath the jammed front door. It couldn't be that cold outside. You couldn't stop looking at the embers of that cigarette. _Oil_ – this black stuff was oil – he was doused, ready to cook, stuck inside a place made of metal that smelled like soft-shell crab and furnace sweepings. They were going to kill him. He didn't know where he was. He was going to die. "Nowhere – you want your head clubbed out a damn window? You want a bullet in your eye? You a Chicago boy? – because that's what we do with them here. Thirty-eight right in the headlights. You with the anarchists? _Nowhere_. Nowhere, de Juarez?"

David choked.

"Oklahoma," he said.

He's maybe seventeen when he moves from Nowhere, Oklahoma to West St. Louis. Hard to say what kind of man he is then, because he's not – not a man yet in anything but the most rudimentary sense. Seventeen is old enough, though. When a child hits that occasion, they graduate into a valuable category. The become a kid – and a kid, you know, is old enough.

Twenty-some. It's the usual age group that gravitated toward his trenches in Los Angeles, confused fuck-ups that had barely been Brujah, hardly made it to adulthood. But they hit hard and ran fast and shot straight. They were old enough to kill and die. Mean little fighters, exceptional goddamn diers – so Nines Rodriguez gives them a gun, a villain, a hope. Kiss on the forehead, pat on the back. _That's my kid_; _that's my blood_; nobody's ever been prouder of you than he has with your magazine full, your machete wet, your heel on a Ventrue's skull. Nobody will ever be more grateful when you soak a Sheriff's sword and end. That is old enough to get shattered for what you're too young to appreciate. That is being a good red-blooded kid.

Good kids are always the ones to die – because they're stupid, because they're young – and, in times of civil war, too often because of a man like that.

Men like that are thought to come from green places. You know what places he means – south jungle countries full of tin, coffee and terrible snakes with beautiful names. They wear bandanas and hats, and they speak poetry, and they smoke. Maybe they write. Maybe they tend to look a little like him. There goes the party line, and there goes the way the top-shelf people think about it. Truth is these voices come from everywhere, from all over the world. They can look like anybody. They are women and girls; they are adolescents and elders. They are workers or thieves or dukes or proles. They are every color and creed or often none at all. But the most important fact is that they can come from everywhere – everywhere with mothers to birth them. They come from rock tundra and sea bluffs and savannah dust. They come from Mongolia and Poland and Ukraine and Sudan and France. They come from the barren, blue-sky, disgruntled Americas. Maybe, just rarely – every once in a while – they come from somewhere plain, somewhere flat, some dull green like the grass you'll find in Oklahoma, roundabout the autumn of 1923.

It was late September of that year when he left. He left a prairie of wheat – simple, standard, staple crop, nothing spectacular about it. He left when they finished the last season haul, trucking bales and pounding sacks of the stuff in some small townlet (a simple, standard, staple townlet he can't remember). He left Marcela with a bottle of Bulgarian tonic for her winter cough and a bottle of regular whisky for everything else. And she left him five bullets in that Argentine gun. _Five bullets,_ she said, _because at least one of those shots is going to be a mistake._

There were four of them to start out with: Saul, Arturo, María. David followed them. He followed them straight out of those cornfield counties and onto asphalt roads until they got to a place that glowed through the night. Good enough kids, sort of friends – the necessary kind you have when you've only known so many people. He can't remember exactly what happened to them now. He can remember sitting on the back of Saul's sputtering Ford flatbed, passing a bottle of watery gin, figuring how many extra miles they'd limp on the gasoline they had. He can remember María's square hand crushing brown recluses on the stucco of their apartment walls. He can remember the first morning somebody got Jim Crowed to death on that block – when he ran downstairs to see where Saul was, left a skillet on, burnt those eggs so badly yolk glued to the stove. He can remember trying to sleep there, in that creaking one-bedroom over Bad Bets Music Shop – trying not to hear horn blare; trying not to hear María and Atruto's bedsprings or fistfights; trying not to hear Saul lose his mind, cussing himself rabid under lamp on Chippewa Street. None of them are that kind of man. None of them lead, and maybe that's why, couple months later, they'd come unknotted and fall apart. Kids with no headship get lost. But that one's a story for another night.

There was buzzing again. David felt something tap – his knuckles, his ears. There it was: one dark spot. Its edges were faint, floating, and he strained hard to follow that mote with his eyes – away from the exit, past the shoes standing over him with film grain faces, over that rotted diesel drum, into the distant place where it hovered, then stopped.

It landed.

_Flies_.

There was a dead body in the far corner. It was one of the other bouncers. It was, he knew, the middle of October, the first blow of the freeze, but the flies were here. They peppered corpse hands, circling, unsettled. They fussed for a taste. Steam rose. His name was something staunch like Charles. There was a foul stream of head blood pooling, stagnant, beneath the back of his skull.

David remembered his own body. They were both covered in oil.

He looked at them with the fear of blind boys in his eyewhites and red in the moonshine blue.

"Don't kill me," the kid screamed. He might have been crying at this point; his lungs seared, tear lines ran through the oil, and the tips of his fingers tingled with an artery kind of cold. "I don't know anything. Oh my God. Jesus Christ. I don't know anybody. Please don't kill me."

He might've tried running if his legs would work proper. Hard telling what the mechanical problem was, too, under all that crude and coldness. They looked all right. It could've just been the harm to his head. David wasn't sure if he ought to be relieved or despaired about that – the world was too scattered and too greasy and too vague. The single cigarette was a violent red flare of Cyclops eye. He couldn't stop shaking. He might have been sobbing. It was a pathetic, run-of-the-mill thing for a St. Louis hatcheteer to see.

"Useless. Goddamn traquero palooka. Here I am bashing this fish's brains out with a fucking piece of lumber and he says _nowhere_. Waste of space mother-fucking Okie. He doesn't work for anybody worth killing. He doesn't know shit."

Cinders spat out and a curl of smoke rose. The potbellied man didn't want to leave disappointed. You might say he was a little put out. Some think Little Italy's in every mobster, but Wes was second-generation Armenian, and Lewy from somewhere upstate, Springfield-raised. "Cashed a Green check, didn't he?"

"That would be telling. Except he doesn't know a Green from a dick." Proof positive: Wes kicked said fish in his guts and shouted over the satisfactory yelp. There was a clear, echoing _snick_; there was a flap of tan trench; there was the circle of a thirty-eight pointing down. The man was tall and made a gesture of his handgun. He'd dropped the bat with a sick, homerun _crak_! "Vito Giannola, you son-of-a-bitch. Giannola, Palizzola. Take your pick. You got a preference? Who banks better?"

"I'm going to puke," David told him.

"Knock yourself out," Wes said, so he did.

The sounds of retching and ceiling chain echoed together in this empty industrial space. Lewy scratched behind both ears of his funny cap. They frowned. They thought about it.

"See?" The pistol went back to its holster. Wes snorted. He gave a halfhearted, waste-of-my-time shrug. "Useless."

"That's unfortunate. What are we going to tell her? What are _you_ going to tell her, more likely." Lewy had what you might call an air of seniority. He was a stout, face-first, nail-biting boxer-dog with the frame of a fullback porking into his forties. Not a leader, no, but a halting side. His eyes were a disgruntled grayish white. His left foot limped and his right one slapped overconfidence. It was a gate that made the fox-fur hat flop, _one-two_, over a sweep of grim, thinning, dishwater hair. He had feather stuffing poked through holes in his leather sleeves. He had what you'd call ham-fists. He jingled when he walked.

They turned to each other for talk. David's throat was clenched and sweltering with stomach acid; his body was now teetering on knees and the heels of its hands. Who knew if this wicked rust taste had come from his organs or crawled into one side of his mouth? He didn't know how badly he was hurt; he didn't know who by; he had the foggiest notion of why it was happening. But you could know that it wouldn't stop here. Everything reeked of gas and the fire to come. The siding would roar, the rotted planks pop, the roof blacken with poison and curl. He thought fierce as he could about standing up. No one was looking at him now, but there were guns in their belts, easily discharged. There was bitumen in his pores. And that cigarette – that furious pupil – was not pinched out.

"—is why I'm the one who tried to tell you. I tried to say to you shits nothing would come out of this but a goddamn goose chase. Smart man ought to just Apache that place, I said; let God sort 'em out. So that was my stand on this thing here. I'm not," Lewy was arguing, critical inhalations, neat steam engine puffs. He was mindful not to toss his spent paper too far. "I'm not telling Chelle the whole lot of these guys was useless. I'm not touching this one. You can fucking forget it."

"Don't be a pussy," Wes noted. David's mind was coming back to him. He winced and spat blood and tried to see like a healthy person could. He tried not to get noticed. There was a fly circling under the twitching flood lights. It got too close; it fried. "It isn't your fat ass on the line."

"I'll be a pussy if and when it suits me. She's going to be in a storm about this one. She's going to be flat antagonized."

"Sister."

"Fuck you, anyway." Lewy hammered his sternum. It looked like a gorilla taunt; it was a bunch of mucus stuck in his bronchs. He shook the cigarette again. He breathed in. "Let's light this shit so I can go home."

He's told you about snakes. Let him tell you something about men. Men like these are called toughboys; they're frightening in a grandslam way; they'll bash your brains to paste if you let them. Men like these will kill you, no question. They'll sleep fine that night then eat a big steak-fries-and-omelet breakfast in the morning. You want to keep yourself in one solid piece – you want to survive – you'll steer clear of men like these.

But you know what? Men like these have a fatal flaw, something to trip them, a hurdle can't be jumped around: they don't order. Men like these don't call shots. They lack that thing – that something more – that would make them matter. You don't have to fear men like this except in a moment. That's one of the benefits of being a kid: nobody is going to come after you years later; nobody is going to remember your name.

David was a stupid fucking kid.

Stupid kids all have the same dumb ideas and the same dishonest egos and the same upset stomachs. These are the stiffs that think everything'll be all right because they've figured themselves a plan. God knows Arturo, Saul and María did. They'd go into a kind of driving business. They'd package, lock, insure places full of wealthy stuff. They'd move things. They'd sail out for a city; it's always a city. It has to be a city, because a city's full of a certain kind of people – city people – and everybody with dirt under their thumbs and bluegrass stains and country fiber on their tongue knows that city people are stitched from a different sort of meat. They are another gender. They are poured and molten, stamped and shined. They aren't hatched out, pulled up, scuffed over, scorched through, worn down. City people are made of money – made of silk suits, mint shirtsleeves, silver bullion. They don't sleep; the lights in a tower never go out. They don't feel pain like the rest of us do. _Follow an industry_, somebody tells every brave, stupid kid who's turned up destitute, fatless, in a registry office with no fucking clue – set yourselves up – live a hundred years. You won't get sick in a city. They don't have big weather. They don't ever see snakes. They don't die.

Nobody told them that those smart city people don't trust anybody with their gold goose eggs and their held things. Stupid kids don't do the moving. Stupid kids are things that get moved.

"Palizzola," he lied to the man with the bat, now the man with the revolver, who didn't want to waste a round. David sputtered and hoped to heaven he pronounced it right. There was a dinosaur taste between his teeth, in his nostrils, around the ducts of his eyes. His mind was racing too fast to scheme ahead and his heart was a hurting thwack. He will burn up like a torch. He had no notion what to do except push that cigarette away a few more seconds, a few more steps – maybe something will happen and maybe someone will come up.

"What the fuck did you say?"

"Look – look, please. Please don't kill me. It's just a job. I'm not a loyalist," the kid tried again, somebody else inside the knot of his throat. His voice was cracking and his bones were shaking and he couldn't try to care. It was a guess in the wind. He got up to his knees and looked horrible wretched. "I can help you; I'll talk. I work shipping. Export. Maybe three years." (Truth was three weeks and they wouldn't buy it without an alibi, but it might give pause, and a window might open; a deadbolt might break.) "I'm a guard. A gunman. I run messages." (Truth was he made $1.20 a day to stand outside a dockhouse looking vaguely mean. Truth was a blonde man in a white coat held up a handful of dollars on Wharf Street and shouted to some teenaged longshoremen: _you boys want to make some easy bucks?_) "Please, look. I don't care. I'll tell you everything. Everything you want to know; swear to God. I'll talk. Just take me out of here."

"He's lying," Wes groaned – just like that, like fudging a little on your taxes, like telling everybody you'd fucked a girl.

"I'm not. I'm not; I swear; swear to God."

"Listen to this. You ever heard 'quit when you're ahead,' you stupid fucking yokel? Seriously."

"I'll say anything. Anything you want me to say. I'll say it to anybody; I don't care..."

"Shut the fuck up, will you?"

David begged aimlessly some more. The way he grabbed the back of his head with both hands in preparation to get killed looked like a sort of prayer.

Lewy hawked spit on the floor.

"Good goddamn Christ, am I through with this. This is not my problem. This is not my problem, this is not your problem, and it's fucking freezing. I'm freezing my ass off," the man with the dumb hat complained. He sucked his bleeding cigarette. He extracted it. He put it out. "Just cuff him and throw him in the car. She can call it. She can figure out what she wants done."

_Live a hundred years_. For Nines Rodriguez, it's always been a city. There has always been some kind of storm.

He met Rochelle the next night. He had iron cuffs on his wrists, a wicked concussion and what felt like frostbite from sleeping tied up like a dog on somebody's basement concrete. He told her about loyalists and Palizzola. She took one look at him and laughed in his face.

Brujah. You remember almost nothing of what this people was, but every one of you knows in the color of your blood and the ache of your fists that we have been wronged.

Here is something about the Brujah: you are supposed to hate. You are supposed to hate your Sire. A part of you is love, but a bigger part is hate – the part that coils and crackles and makes your head spin in the pretense of some devils' law. Some monsters were not made for society and some creatures are predestined to count coup. This is the same stuff that divides the workers from the warriors, the queens from the rest of their hive. This is instinct. This is how nature trickles down its genes. And like a toddling colt adores its mare, you probably won't hate them at first. Need makes for fierce family. That is how generations move.

There will come a time, though – a future night when you find your sea legs, you grow large, and you begin to feel that black bubble in your chest. There will come a time when all of that learning and all of that nice shit stops tugging heartstrings anymore. There will come a time when the gravity of what has been done to you sinks in, crumbles, and boils into a tar dust fire there's only one or two ways to put out. David's never been in a fire. David won't die for a while yet. But he knows all about hate.

Rochelle Adrieux had that nameless thing about her. She was Creole, plaçage wedding baby circa 1830, blonde and broad-shouldered, and you could hear a bayou wind chafe the back of her teeth. You'd never find her without a gun. Somebody taught her that lesson a long time ago; a revolver and a jackknife, ash on her lashes, lipstick redder than war. There was buckshot clinking in her peacoat pockets. She did this thing when she turned – this spiteful, taunting twist on her back heeled shoe – gangplank stride, not catwalk. She wore her hair unfashionably long and let it get thick. She had a young round face to spite the couple wrinkles that happied dark eyes – powder would stick on the fingers of her gloves; white ones; she had that kind of old admiral class. _"Never killed a man I didn't like,"_ she'd laugh, in a way that made you wonder. She had a little Marie Laveau. She was full of nicotine and toxins and that stare deepened you like nightshade, like pitch, like licorice. She'd been about forty when she died, maybe forty-one, forty-two.

It is survival of the meanest with the witches. Successors and leaders are determined by loyalty games, by what a man is willing to do. Make backup plans. Make friends. Make examples. Make people think you are capable of anything they'd dream under the right circumstances and with the right crowd. If you are going to shoot somebody, he's always said, you'd better shoot to kill. If you are going to hit somebody, better hit them hard. But what Nines Rodriguez learned that most of them don't: he who hits the hardest doesn't matter half as much as where he hits, and when.

Let him tell you something. People like these, legacy like ours – there are two deaths to die. Go ahead and do what you have to. Scream for your right as loud as you can. Raise an army; kill tyrants with tyrannical prejudice; demolish anybody if they deserve it, or if they won't let-be. Do all of that and more; it could change how things unfold today. But child, whatever you win – whatever hides you skin on your marches – you need to realize tomorrow is different thing. Tomorrow is done. What comes for you at the curtain, honey, is a decided thing; you are a cycle; you are a penalty case. There are no outs for a man like that, whose page is already written. It is going to happen. A Ventrue is going to get you in the end. And if she doesn't, you can bet that another Brujah will.

She said:

"_What's your name, kid?"_

"_You shoot straight, kid?" _

"_You ever kill anybody, kid?" _

"_Dead man of mine is worth more than a pistola in the mouth, kid," she said, "and it may be I have a proposition for a kid like that."_

One night in Harlem. Maybe, after all those years and all those kids, she saw it coming. But she never saw it coming like that.

"_Kid," she said. "You want a job?"_

Would you believe it? Your people were set afire by the Ventrue – they were burnt up and burned down and left to die – but before that, Brujah, we were eaten by our own.

You know your history. Or maybe you don't; he never has paid much attention, seen the relevance, either way. What you will understand is that there are a handful of truths about your kind of demon, a selection of cultural facts. The Brujah keep living. The Brujah do not bow or bow out. The Brujah have it rough. There is a great justice in Clan Brujah and in the narration of their collapse, a slow death that has blazed since the ancients; there is a greater hate. There are big snakes against them. Terrible snakes, beautiful names – names that mean something, names like fer-de-lance, Camarilla, la Croix. They are a snare drum that keeps a suffering nation moving. The indignity and the murder inherent to them have found a way to make these people endure.

There are three reasons for the devastation of a clan. There is the Ventrue. There are the unfaithful Troiles. And there is the echo of Brujah – _the_ Brujah, and all the fury of her prehistoric betrayal – passed down through the ages, screeching in her daughters and sons, making them hate so hard that they will hurl their children into the pit for a piece of what was once. They will immolate themselves for a piece of that honor glory, of that hero character. They will sacrifice the tragedy of all these years to settle a score – what they _think_ is for the sake of survival is really about making their oldest enemies hurt, suffer, pay.

There is a force in nature that makes monsters. It not raving Garou or rabid boar. It is not the proud resentment of a lion. It is not for men or women or melancholy things. This monster is a quiet, deliberate, selfish kind of shrewdness. They're the type of monsters made by frustration – not the luscious frustration of wants denied to you, but the frustration of _having_: having-had, and having ripped away. It is the same whisper of world that drives whales mad; that makes mothers eat their babies; that tells a caged carnivore to starve, to pace, to bide its time. If you lock up a wolf, the wolf will destroy you. It does not matter how close and strong the bars are. The wolf who has been wild learns how to be patient; it learns to watch, to rein in, to hate the smell of your jacket and the tap of your boots and the bite of your stick. It learns how to plan. It learns how to smile its mangling teeth and make friends. It learns how to think like a conqueror, and it has the desperation of a famished, beaten beast. You can expect that wolf will find a way.

Two options for a ruler, for someone who finds her flock has a wolf: shoot it, or throw open the door. Those are the only two options. Some think the second is hardly an option at all, and yes, it might give you doubts to hear it from him. But it's tried and it's true: if you turn a wolf loose, the surprise of that moment will shrink it – make it forget what it was, forget you exist. The unexpected can trump the angry. The wolf will not know what to do and that will humble it mightily. With an exit flung wide, with a promise of woods and a place to get lost in, and with wind in his nose, an old monster has nothing it knows how to be but a thing that runs. And he'll run. He will. He'll run until he forgets what he was and where he came from and no, he'll never come back. That's what will happen if you set free a wolf.

Or you could unload a gun. He's got no kind of moral ground to preach on; hell, he's not going to tell you the right thing to do. If you shoot it, you shoot it. Click, bang, problem solved. But if you rule to the point where a wolf breaks itself free, then your choices are over; your crown is splintered; your neck belongs between its jaws. Because a wolf who has been wild will not flee with the other creatures. It has not schemed, lingered and scratched itself here just to be wild again. That will never happen. It's a fundamentally different animal, and there's no going back to the way it used to be; he doesn't think so; there has already been a death and a loss. And with the feel of loss, the loss of meaning and of self, it is going to turn on you when the others escape. At some point, escape has stopped being its goal. It is not about power or subsistence. That wolf has survived for the satisfaction of killing you.

When the wolf has ceased to care for its clan or its life but for the damage it can do – that is the day a trapper, and a Ventrue, will understand what frustration means.

Don't believe that True Brujah nonsense. There is only one sort of Brujah and they have only one truth. There is nothing true in Nines Rodriguez, at all – nothing but this time, and those teeth, and that wolf kind of hate.

What does the true Brujah do? They paint themselves in oil. They build bombs. They stand in the dark of a gold city hill, and when there's nowhere else to run to and no one else to die, they strike a match. They are going to take you with them. They burn themselves down.

Rochelle didn't kill David for a long time yet. She just hadn't got the pang, and he hadn't given her a reason. He owned a steady shot. He made a decent ghoul. He was a good kid.

Good kids die. Good kids rage. Good kids are the ones you can trust. Good kids are point-men and gun-runners and expendable bodies. Good kids do it all because they don't know any better – because somebody older, somebody smarter, didn't have it in their leadership interests to lay this baby-eating dance all out. Most of them won't learn. Most of those kids will be long gone before there was ever a chance. Nines Rodriguez – whoever he was on some bitter cool October, whatever the name, however long ago it happened – got real lucky and got real wise. He's been real lucky. He's been pretty wise. But that is not, you should recognize, the way a good kid – even the best ones – usually turn out.

This is Nines Rodriguez laying it out for you now. Do not be a good kid. Do not die for a cause. Do not follow that kind of man.

David is not that kind of man, was never that kind of man. So he became someone else – a man who was. He became a man who talked soft and hit hard. He became a man who put his back on the wall and didn't profess to wanting a title, didn't call himself Baron, didn't talk about control – a man who wouldn't wear crowns, who was mortal like you, but who looked like he'd never die if he just had your help. He became a man whose hands were heavy with rings that would hurt. He became a man who seemed like he wasn't conscious of the way he stood, didn't realize he sounded like that, didn't know what color his eyes were. If he made you love him, it was by accident. If he did something smooth, he's not aware; if he smiled down your throat and took out your heart with his teeth, it wasn't intentional, sorry about that. If he gave you hope – let you wish you _might really make it through, might really survive_ – if he made you think for the first time since forever _it doesn't have to be like this_, well, believe him: it wasn't on purpose, it wasn't a lie, and you know, poor kid, he kind of regrets that he did.

He's told you everything. He is telling you so that you can make real decisions, not poor-kid ones, and not accidents. He has told you almost all there was about him and the lie of that State and the people who died to keep him there. Now you know. And now you know that better not be you.

If you are going to die young, Childe, don't do it for a leader or a cause. Do it because you've got a wolf in you, too.

His Sire told him this once – the cruelest, and the best, truth Rochelle ever let slip. She said: _Here's what blood is going to get you_, and she shot her own son in the head.

He can't tell you about children – not real ones. He can't tell you about real people, real daughters or real sons. He never bothered having any. He can only tell you this: there is no room for two men in one. When you decide to become a man like that, you make a decision – and for the rest of your life, that decision is going to make you. It is not something to be done capricious. You become a man like that, well – most of us have to unbecome another one – and that other one has nowhere but nothing to go.

Something is said about vampires, and about men who lead: they get hollow. There is no room for two in one; there's no room for twice a species of beast. So the nature of that beast is going to have to change. They concave. They mutate. They are a face on a house of bone. Whatever was inside – whatever meat, whatever human, whatever kid – gets drank up, until all you have is closed fists, pretty teeth, and wolf skin.

Listen to this. A body made of skin is an awful fragile body. A body made of skin has to act rough, look like there's no knock it can't take, but you'll know – and he'll know – it can't take any; it will fail. It will fail no matter how hard you learn to believe in your lie. You have no substance, no atoms. No hope structure; no dogma, no personal faith; no _person_, not anymore. You will have nothing and nobody left to fall back on some day. You have no truth. When all you have is skin, you'll be a powerful man – persuasive man, dangerous man, somebody who looks and sounds worth dying for – but you are also an endangered man. You will tear easily. You will make a big target. You will flare up like a wooden city, like a bomb on a Hollywood hill. Every snake is trying to kill a man like that, and if you break the skin you stitched yourself, you know what isn't underneath.

Nines Rodriguez has always been a man to lead – and when you become someone long and loud enough, the other one, the smaller one, is lost.

Two deaths for a snake; three dead captains in a dying State; four kids on a truck; five bullets his mother gave him; six shots; seventeen years; eight chances; nine millimeter. Count them all up and pick your number. It only takes one kid to die for a man like that to lead.

* * *

**Venting: I have quite literally had this one finished for weeks but haven't had time to sit and proof it until now. SDHASDOHASDAPSDHWOYAH MFA IN FANFICTION. I'm going to be taking a break now to catch up on reviewing others' work, but I'm working on stuff. Seriously. Really. I promise.  
**

**Now, question for y'all: **_**Harlem Sunset**_** slips some winks to the **_**Byzantine Black**_**/**_**Lumen Event **_**crowd, but it will never require reading either. I still ended up dropping significant plot and character references in these last two chapters. So here's my open question: **

**For those familiar with **_**Byzantine Black**_**: are these references something you'd like to see more of? For those who aren't familiar with it: did the references throw off your reading? I'm curious to hear where you think the line should fall, and open to shifting it either way.**

**MORE ON THAT POINT: This chapter probably outs that I've got a general (and maybe a specific) audience in mind for Rodriguez here. I'm nevertheless pretty hesitant to smack down one set point in time, because HS must remain free-standing. But the fact that there **_**are **_**hindsight references can probably support a generic guess as to roundabout where the whole thing might hypothetically fall on a BB universe timeline. (To be extra shifty: this exercise "may or may not" hint at what's to come in LE. Again, though, **_**Harlem Sunset**_** stands independently.)**

* * *

**ONE LAST THING: Not to clutter the chapter with huge notes like ye olden days, but I feel like a heel for not individually thanking people just because they don't have FF accounts, so this one's for the anons. (Hopefully nobody feels like I am putting their business out here; if you do, let me know. I'll edit it out.)**

Guest: ** Yes, yes, yes. I think you're on to something there about the nightmares worry. Thanks for the food for thought! That's exactly the kind of feedback that can really get the gears turning. **

Riley: ** Probably not the best way for kiddo to handle that one, I agree. Thanks for the comment! (If you can stand my lumbering purple prose long enough to drop me a line, I am as happy as a clam.)**

Lila**: ** **Thanks to you, duckling! Yeah, Nines can be polarizing. He's engaging to write, but tell you what: I'm not voting for him. (If you're the same Lila that commented on BB a while back, I owe you a double-thanks for that one, too.)**

thinman**: Thanks for your all of your comments and advice, your friendly support, and for your gorgeous artistic rendering. (Not to mention your patience with my outrageous delays.) I was having a pretty low day when I got your last message and your acceptance really cheered me up. (**_**Psst**_**: It won't be the same scene – one of the original parties is slightly, um, dead – but there will definitely be love & sexy parts in LE. THIS IS THE REAL TALK. HOLD ME TO IT.)**

Monkimora**: Marcela is definitely not going to win Parent of the Year Award any time soon. Thank you for your well-explained feedback! I kind of get writer blindness when I work on a piece too long. I have trouble gauging emotion because I'm too worried about punctuation things, so your review was very helpful. **

**EVERYONE: Much thanks for your assistance, your funnies, and for sharing your interpretations. It really does help me figure out how I'm coming across and what needs to change. You have my sincerest gratitude, as always.**


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